7 comments:

Philip Levine in his prose memoir book The Bread of Time also talks some about John Berryman -- he was a student for a semester in a poetry writing class Berryman taught at the U. of Iowa back in the 1950's (during the years before Creative Writing MFA programs had mushroomed up all over the landscape). According to Levine's recollection, Berryman was every bit as severe in his advice to his students as Merwin describes in the poem.

The line (in Merwin's poem) about papering your walls with rejection slips makes me wonder when Merwin wrote this -- I've heard/read the same advice, the same exact words, "paper your walls with rejection slips," numerous times over the years.

After I first read or heard the suggestion, I took it almost literally for a while. I didn't actually paste them as wallpaper, but for several years when I was first writing, I used to tack rejection slips up on a bulletin board on the wall across from a couch where I frequently sat and wrote, so they would be staring at me while I was writing.

In a way, I think it helped me to shrug them off, or develop a thick skin, or stare back defiantly, or whatever way to put it. Eventually the trick seemed to have served its purpose, and I stopped tacking the rejection slips up on the wall. However useful it might have been for me at the time, in retrospect I don't think I'd offer the same advice to anyone else. Better just to toss the rejection slips and keep writing.